On camera, or on Mic, don’t over-produce your subjects

I am never comfortable whenever someone freezes that smile or his head angle for a picture I am about to take. It’s become the done thing to strike a pose. Not sure where this comes from, but I get the feeling it’s got something to do with a celebrity culture –and perhaps the media uproar when someone is caught looking less photo-ready.

I’ve also worked with PR people and know there is a solid reason to make sure the room is set up well so that the Big Guy (or Gal) acts natural. Controlling clothing, lighting, messing with hands or tapping on a table etc. There’s a good post about this by Paula Lovell, with a related discussion worth following at a LinkedIn group.

Gerard Braud is a pro at this and I’ve even sat in one of his media training workshops some years back at an IABC conference. He knows what he’s talking, so if you do have a client or am planing to put someone on camera, this is a great place to start.

But I have some comments about looking too ‘produced’. It’s not what the pros may say, but think about this:

• Why should a CEO or thought leader always look like he/she never makes mistakes, and is flawless? Given the big push for transparency in communications in general, business and government in particular, wouldn’t the target audience prefer to see someone who looks slightly more human than studio settings permit?
• A videographer or photographer could over-prepare a subject. Isaac Pigott makes a good point that the confidence from being who you are trumps all other external factors. That’s why teleprompters are scorned so much, today.

I my new profession, Education, I also teach children to present ideas and ignore the technology as much as they could. Yes I use cameras – video and DSL. I also put them in front of a microphone –corded and a ZoomH4N. It is possible to train them too much; it is also possible to let them come up with the most amazing things, unscripted, warts and all. I know what you may be thinking. They don’t have stakeholders to convince.

It’s a long shot from a CEO interview or podcast that I used to do until recently, but I’ve found some striking similarities in making them come off ‘as they are’ not as we want them to be.

If you are an educator, I write about these education issues at Voices-On.com

 

Searching for context, more than keyword dumpster diving

It’s frustrating to hear people say “I researched that” when they simply mean “I looked it up on Google.”

I believe we have diluted the word ‘research’ by equating it to a one-click action. I’m not trying to say that every topic under the sun needs a deep dive. I’m not suggesting that we turn fact-finding into some geeky task. I’m suggesting that we ought to train our brains to think that knowing something is contextual. There is no pat answer.

Google must know this. It stepped up to the late with the release of what it calls the ‘knowledge graph.’ (I am not a big fan of the term. It has a hint of Zuckerberg;s ‘social graph,’ doesn’t it?) Nevertheless, if you haven’t noticed the contextual info showing up on Google, take a look.

If you’re into the deep dive thing, Google does have a few tricks it tends to hide from the general public.  But there are more. Try these:

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com
It provides pages from books, PDFs, scholarly literature, peer-reviewed journals, material found via Google books, and even court opinions. Duke University encourages students to use it!

Patent Search - http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en

Lexis Nexis - http://www.lexisnexis.com
This is not a free service, but it combines information from legal, academic, and corporate knowledge databases.

 

Healthcare, now a social, not private affair!

Time was when someone would keep his/her healthcare concerns under the hood, so to speak. A health complication would be kept within the family; the unwritten doctor-patient privacy act was upheld.

Now? We seem to be ready to blab more about it. or, to put it another way, patients are more than ready to take to social media to discuss health-related issues in the open. Some examples

• I once interviewed a CCL survivor, Andrew Schorr, who formed a community and a radio show around social media collaboration. Pat
• Elliott was one of the earliest people I knew who believed that community involvement with regard to one’s health information was to be welcomed.
• Robert Scoble was onto this health privacy-is-dead issue three years ago, curating a series of comments. One of them: There are much larger health benefits to be gained by allowing your healthcare provider to openly share you information between providers/organizations.

This latest report by PwC recognizes this, and gives you a more granular look at how the private concerns of those seeking healthcare have become closely intertwined with their social media behavior.

For example:

• Nearly a quarter of people in the US (24%) post something about their healthcare experience.
• 16 % share health-related videos and images!

It gets more interesting, in the face of concerns about invasion of privacy and health information.

• Some 30% of people are willing to share their health-elated information with other patients, using social channels.
• Also, 80% of 18-24 year-olds are likely to share health information through social media. 80 percent! You could find out more here at the PwC site.

This ought to have huge implications for healthcare companies, and even medical practitioners who have been concerned that their connecting with patients could run afoul with health information privacy, or HIPAA, laws. Physicians have been behind the curve. Sermo, their online community, has just 130,000 users, but one study found that while 87% of physicians use at least one social media site at a personal level, only 67% are using at least one site for professional reasons.

 

Why Journalists go for your blog

There are some studies that compare a company’s Twitter profile to a blog.

The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer study, which I’ve always found to be a fascinating read on where we are in social media practice, had some equally strong indicators as to where traditional and digital media sit on the trust scale.

For instance, trust in company’s web sites are (hold your breath!) up!

So this infographic, which summaries a survey by UK-based Text 100 is a good sidebar to the study. It speaks of engaging journalists using social media.

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Learning through customization and personalization

Would you be ok to have your child interviewed to be admitted to Kindergarten?

I know  of parents who have prepped their children for that face-to-face admission evaluation process widely used today by Charter schools. Hard to argue with this if we really want a revolution in education.

So, what if students are required to qualify to be admitted to school? Many schools resort to a lottery system, since there are a few hundred openings but a few thousand applications! But in addition to this, there’s the student interview. It’s a bit like applying for a job. One Pennsylvania charter school, Tacony Academy, has this requirement:

“each student must complete an Independent Research Presentation and present the results to a panel of teachers and administrators.

 The Independent Research Presentation should be science related and either follows Scientific Method, the Question-Answer model, or the Problem-Solution model.”

This kind of motivation tells a school how to better customize a program to the student.

Speaking of which, Ken Robinson makes a great observation as to why education should not be served like fast food.

 

Graphics, info-graphics and flat-out dubious statistics

I thought I loved info-graphics, until they were run over my marketing people.

Seriously. I used to find the art of info-graphics irresistible long before we they grew like weeds, online. The people who wee good at it were illustrators who worked for newspapers. Some complex heist, or a catastrophic event would be nicely compressed into an info-graphic in a newspaper.

Now there are so many info-graphics, I found this infographc about infographics!

But what exactly is an info-graphic?

It is usually used as a synonym of Data Visualization. But is it? The simple definition of DV is that it tells a story using data points. But it need not be a ‘graphic’ per se. It could be a dynamic time line, such as the Time Line produced by the Guardian, London. They created what seems like a nice graphic of the incidents of rioting in London in August. But it contains a slider that allows the reader to move through the days from 6th August onward, as towns from Tottenham to Ealing to… Liverpool reported incidents.

Here’s what it looks like. Click on image to launch visualization.

Contrast this to an Info-graphic, Big Brothers, about satellites that countries from Mexico to Pakistan to Iran have sent up.

To me the best info-graphic does these five things:

• It summarizes a large volume of data in a snapshot.
• It tells a story by helping our eye navigate complexity, and move between icons or illustrations that represent events, people, trends, hierarchies.
• It is great at providing supplemental information on a page, when the publisher does not want to lose the reader who might turn the page, and jump to something else.
• It provides a sense of scale, through visual tweaks, to explain something that might be difficult to comprehend, even with traditional data we cram into presentations (tables, lists, quotes, price points…) The orbiting satellites info-graphic above does a great job of this.
• It provides direction, and relationships of where that direction might take you. The simplest info-graphic for me is the compass. I do not need to know the ‘degree’ of the direction, as long as I have the four data points. The best known inf-graphic in this category is the London Underground map.

So what then, is an info-graphic? To Alberto Cairo, an info-graphic specialist, and author of Infographia,  who teaches this stuff,

 ”Infographics are difficult to define precisely because of their multiple and flexible nature….an information graphic is an aid to thinking and understanding.

He goes on to say that an info-graphic makes patterns arise, helps readers stumble upon trends, and it does this in a very small space. Because an info-graphic is so easy grab attention, especially in a world where few people have tolerance for long-form content (such as this post; sorry folks!) an info-graphic can be completely distorted and not get too mush scrutiny.

I am working on an article on just this topic. So if you have some examples -the good, the bad, the completely distorted– please leave a comment here or send me a tweet.

I will leave you with a great resource by Aaron Weyenberg. His post, “How to distort data” looks at the dangers that lie here.

Be warned. This is not a short form content, but it does have some cool graphics!

 

Tablets, digital media coming to a school near you

I have been covering the intersection of technology and education recently, and have interviewed some amazing people at the forefront of the changing classroom.

One of them was Hans Aagard, senior technologist at Purdue University, Indiana. I was intrigued by that university’s approach –plunging in with a social networking application called Hot Seat. It is being used not just on campus, but in the classroom, while the lecture is in progress.

But yes, we are running into mixed signals.

• While some teachers get their students to create content for topics that have been poorly covered or badly written in Wikipedia, many schools ban on students using Wikipedia.
• A 2010 survey found that 62.7 percent of US undergraduates surveyed say they owned an Internet-capable handheld device, but many universities have signs posted outside lecture halls about turning off cell phones and electronic devices.
• Faculty worry that too many screens in class could be distracting to the student and to others, while some high schools have made tablets and laptops integral to the learning experience.

More on this soon. My article was just published in a Sept-Oct issue of Communication World magazine.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see the subject “What Will School Look Like in 10 Years?” taken up in the New York Times  last week. I was particularly interested in the comment by David Silvernail, dir. at the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Education. He would rather schools invest in small amounts of technology …to teach students process skills, not just plunking shiny objects in their backpack and expecting them to automatically become smarter. Is he swimming upstream?

• Also just recently South Korea announced it would swap paperbacks for tablets by 2014.
• My son’s former high school introduced tablets last year.

I have to admit I have mixed feelings on this.

I teach a robotics class in elementary school. For the past few classes I have been driving  home the importance of research. Finding solutions to problems they never knew existed.  I send them off to encyclopedias, dictionaries and other print material -on purpose. I could easily get them to log on to computers and search –there are more than 20 PCs in the room! But that would be too easy. I don’t want to hold up a think-outside-the-box mantra for problem solving and stick them in front of a… box!

 

Let’s send our congressmen to social media boot camp

Interesting statement by the Ministry of Defense on soldiers using social media:

“We are not here to gag people, because we acknowledge the ubiquity and significant benefits that social media offers to people and the MoD.”

The warning comes at a good time, almost a bit late in the game, now that soldiers have been using a host of social media to stay in touch with their families and even the media. Now that not one, but two congressman have been caught with poor social media discretions, it’s about time for a social media boot camp for government!

Back in 2004, the military began cracking down on personal journals maintained by soldiers serving in Iraq.  Some still blog, but are not sure if they will get into trouble, as this NPR story, reveals.

This April, in the wake of Wikileaks, a Pentagon official, Doug Wilson talked about how “technology — and particularly technology at the intersection of national security — has outpaced the policy.”

My reaction was: Still? You would think thee are more policy wonks than tech people in government.

It’s not just the defense folks who have realized that policy has always been lagging as technology zips ahead. States have been facing the same problem. A national survey of social media in government found that

• Two-thirds of survey respondents lack enterprise policies addressing social media
• One-third of the states responding have enterprise policy standards,and are in the process of developing these

Furthermore, “relatively few have developed policies or guidelines to provide an enterprise context for managing social media tool use,” and are “completely balked by uncertainty”

Bottom line, they are seriously lagging in policy.

But the government has also stepped up, with its just released International Strategy for Cyber-security. It states that

“The United States supports an Internet with end-to-end interoperability, which allows people worldwide to connect to knowledge, ideas, and one another through technology that meets their needs.”

All this big picture stuff is well and good. Someone needs to put our elected officials in a room give them a 101 course in using digital channels. Their DIY method of using social media is turning out to be one of DYI –Damaging Yourself Irreparably.

 

Will teachers grab onto Augmented Reality?

What kind of crazy person will incorporate Augmented Reality in a classroom?

Don’t student’s already have too much of gaming and visual distraction in their lives? I hear you. But AR is a whole new system. I don’t think a teacher’s age will be a factor of adoption. I’ve met some who are willing to do anything to make text-books and charts come alive. They will be those who say ‘this is way too technical for us’ –the same ones who fear digital readers will kill libraries, or think blogs are too scary–and stick to photocopies and glue.

Unfortunately students may not agree! Many of them come to school with some digital device in their backpack. They cannot turn them on, but they sure know how to use them. Then, when they leave their analog classroom, and get back home, they become fully-engaged digital citizens. Something’s wrong with this picture!

OK, I over-simplified the problem. Classrooms are not exactly analog. We do have computers for students to use. We do have smart boards such as Blackboard and Promethean. But often, these are used to broaden and amplify what the teacher has to say, not what the student might be ready to experience.

I have covered Augmented Reality many times before, especially how it is being used in business environments. Now, as it begins making tentative steps into the classroom, we need to make sure educators understand where this is coming from, where it is headed. Many will want to understand how it might integrate with that marvelous piece of technology a.k.a the text book!

Yesterday, I interviewed Scot Jochim, from Digital Tech Frontier, a Tempe, Arizona-based company. He has some radical ideas about how AR could be embedded in educational environments to enhance ‘non-linear skill sets.’  (Stay tuned for a longer post on that interview.)

As I have moved from the digital world of business into teaching, I am exploring how schools of the future might be run.

• Will they be something like the twilight zone scenario portrayed by Ira Glass in a recent episode of This American Life, which featured Brooklyn Free School?
• Or will it be there be social media-enhanced curricula, such as the school profiled in The New York Times, where a teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa uses a Twitter-like feature in a literature class?

In an upcoming story, ‘Messing Around In Class,’ I featured how Higher Ed is moving in this direction, away from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ model to more interactive, collaborative classrooms. Truly inspiring work at Purdue, Scottsdale Community College, and Singapore Management University.

 

Teachers should be “more than talking heads”

You may have heard of Nolan Bushnell. No?

He founded Atari, and is perhaps one of the fathers of the video game industry. (He was named by  Newsweek as one of the  ”50 Men Who Changed America.”)

He makes a point about education that is true for communicators: that the learning environment is toast, and we are competing for the minds and hearts of an audience that has moved far beyond what our established systems can cope with.

I just got done with an article for publication on why the marriage between newsletter publishers and readers is on the rocks. While researching this topic I came across a common thread between education and business communication. We are trying to pry open the new cannister (attention) with an old set of tools.

The competition for the  minds of kids is not sufficient. We have to have more than talking heads, says Bushnell. (He recommends abolishing classrooms!). The one-to-many distribution of information is fraught with problems.

• Pace is one of those problems
• Class size is the other.

These are connected. Altering the pace means altering the class size, he says.

I’ve conducted many webinars and workshops. Virtual and face-to-face. I can see from where he comes. The moment I become the talking head in front of a cool PowerPoint template, I lose the audience. Sure I have their attention, but I lose the connection — between my brain and theirs.

Watch Bushnell’s presentation, and even if you have issues with video games, try to see the meta discussion here. I have problems with the lure of instant gratification and the goals of education. But new media is not something we can keep locked up in a dark room. The academic response to Wikipedia has moved quite a bit from horror to skepticism to adoption. I have seen how teachers have inspired students to create a literary project using a Wiki. Social learning is here –another topic worth exploring –whether we like it or not.

But if I put this aside, I could glean some great ideas from some of what he says here.

Thanks to my friend Manoj Fernando for pointing me to Bushnell